In modern society, not only the congenital handicapped but also the acquired handicapped tend to keep increasing due to a variety of reasons such as traffic accident or industrial accident. Mobility right of the transportation vulnerable such as the handicapped is a right complying with the fundamental human right. In this regard, it is required to provide high-class service for the transportation vulnerable in the field of aviation which is a high-quality means of transportation.
Further, with the advent of an aging society, the demand for guaranteeing the mobility right of the transportation vulnerable is steadily increasing. In view of the lack of publicity and social consensus upon barrier-free environment, however, it is still required to actively participate in building up the barrier-free environment.
Moreover, in spite of increase of domestic or foreign tourists, facilities for the transportation vulnerable in Korean airports including Jeju Airport are much inferior to those in the advanced countries. In this regard, starting from the year of 2008, the Ministry of Construction and Transportation has run “barrier-free Certification system” for evaluating and authenticating whether a means of transportation, a passenger facility, a road, a district, a building, a park, or the like is designed and constructed so that the transportation vulnerable such as the handicapped, the elderly, and the pregnant do not experience inconvenience in transportation. That is, there have been made various government-wide efforts to protect the mobility right of the transportation vulnerable.
In general, there is a height difference (step) between a floor-level of a boarding gate of an airplane and a floor-level of a front end passage of a boarding bridge, which may cause a problem in a wheel-driven transportation such as a wheelchair for the handicapped. For this reason, there has been a strong demand for the development of an automatic slope adjusting device capable of connecting the airplane and the boarding bridge to thereby allow the transportation vulnerable not to suffer discomfort in transportation throughout the whole process from the arrival at the airport to the boarding onto the airplane. A related technology is described in Japanese Patent Publication No. 2004-090771 (2004 Mar. 25).